Saturday, March 28, 2009

The Baltimore Drive-by, Part XIV

"In here?"

"Yep. It's Philly's hottest new brew pub. We can talk without being interrupted by service."

Fifteen minutes later, Blake and I had our beer. Twenty minutes later, we had a plan: Get onto the construction site next to the building, cut a few utility wires, and get inside while everyone is trying to figure out what happened. No one would be suspicious if the lights went off suddenly; that sort of thing went on in Philadelphia all the time. The city's condo boom meant construction everywhere, and the crews worked fast, night and day. That meant forests of wires and pipes just waiting to get pulled, yanked, chopped or accidentally cut. Electricity, phone service, even water, if you swung your sledgehammer right.

"OK," Blake said, "what do we do once we get in?"

"We trash Joss's Porsche."

Blake looked at the ceiling then back at me. "All right, we spray-paint your mean boss's car, and then?"

"Then the real job starts."

======================

(Read all of "The Baltimore Drive-by" so far here And remember: This is fiction. It never happened.)

Dorte, this lesson will require a bit of extra homework and a better online Danish dictionary than I have now. I am able to quess at the second and third words. Tomrrow, perhaps, I'll see how good my guesses were.

My verification word may be of interest to sloppy spellers and students of Hinduism: shacti

Loren, that line was inspired by true events, which is not to say it was a true story.

I wrote it in a pub where the bar man was taking longer than he should have to notice my existence, But he did notice eventually, and in far less than fifteen minutes. I also recognize that, while younger servers may be no worse than older ones, their attitude leaves much to be desired. They often are happy to serve you, but they will not recognize that serving you has any greater claim on their time than does talking or sending text messages to friends.

But I'll save that for a future installment of ... "The Baltimore Drive-by."

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About Me

This blog is a proud winner of the 2009 Spinetingler Award for special services to the industry and its blogkeeper a proud former guest on Wisconsin Public Radio's Here on Earth. In civilian life I'm a copy editor in Philadelphia. When not reading crime fiction, I like to read history. When doing neither, I like to travel. When doing none of the above, I like listening to music or playing it, the latter rarely and badly.
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